Minnesota Awards Pilot to CPSI
CPSI is pleased to announce their selection as vendor partner for the Minnesota Department of Education’s data interoperability pilot project. The project is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) to the Department of Education. Its primary purpose is to investigate the exchange of student data using a K-12 open data standard called the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). The pilot will be based on a grant provided by the Minnesota Department of Education to applicant Minnesota school districts (including approved charter schools) or Regional Management Information Centers (RMIC). The selected recipients will use the SIF data collection model and infrastructure standard to create and send the state student identifier to the recipient’s student information system. The student identifier information will be passed via a real-time process that securely collects student information, validates the data, assigns a student identifier (ID) and passes the ID back to the student information system.
Once the feasibility study is completed successfully, the state plans to expand the process with additional grant recipients. In addition, real time data collection and validation can expand to other state agencies that interact with the Minnesota DOE. The proposed award period is anticipated to be from January 2012 through June 2013.
The pilot is based on CPSI’s solution, xDStudio State Enterprise Edition, a SIF-certified application suite that allows for real time or nearly real time collection of data. The software provides the means for DOE staff to create and manage data collection rules and validations. The collected data is securely housed in an Operational Data Store (ODS). The ODS is based on the SIF data model and, by design, contains real time data from the districts. Data collection business rules run against the data in the ODS and the districts are notified of validation errors via a portal or e-mail. Data errors can be corrected by school district staff in their student information system in a continuous cycle for data quality improvement. The data collected will be used to match a new student with existing student IDs. If an existing ID matches the student’s data such as name, race, gender and birth date, it will be assigned. This system will improve the state’s tracking of students who move from one school to another, improve of quality of data in the student information system and ultimately provide more accurate reporting.
The software can be customized by the state’s in-house developers, providing them with the capability create new validations and dynamically expand their Data Object Model at a later date using any XML-based data standard such as SIF, National Education Data Model (NEDM), Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), Dell Foundation Ed-Fi, and other innovative solutions.
About the Minnesota Department of Education
Led by Commissioner Dr. Brenda Cassellius, the Minnesota Department of Education is an innovative agency serving a wide range of customers: approximately 850,000 K-12 students and their families; 118,000 young children participating in a variety of early learning programs including Head Start and ECFE; 82,000 adult learners participating in adult education programs including GED and citizenship programs; Minnesota’s 339 school districts and over 52,000 licensed teachers. For more information, please visit http://education.state.mn.us.
